“Both religion and musicals work best with energetic and committed believers, and cynicism and detachment will destroy the magic.”

Putting musicals and religion on the same pedestal, Lisa Randall, a professor at Harvard beautifully outlines how the sheer concept of musicals not being relevant in today’s society germinated within the minds of the cynics and the detached. Both have a certain magical aura and feel to them that can be compared to very few things, and experiencing something of the fashion should certainly be on every person’s list.

Musicals definitely are relevant to today’s society, especially in works such as A Clockwork Orange, but they have to battle against other forms of entertainment that are equally relevant but more accessible. The worldwide phenomena of downloading films and music videos have brought the theatre to the people’s homes. This is not to say that younger audiences are inherently lazy-certainly not. If that was the case, young theatre societies, and dedicated teams of reviewers, bloggers and investigative journalists would simply cease to exist. And it’s not to say that younger audiences would never see a musical and might not even prefer seeing a musical to downloading a film, but that the very special experience of seeing something live is more of a demand to make with one’s time and one has to be in the right mood to give back as an audience, whereas with film, particularly viewed at home, nothing is required from the audience at all, one doesn’t even have to be dressed, and the movie can be paused, rewound and replayed as per requirement. But despite being faced with all these challenges, it is the culture of musicals and not movies that carve a niche for audiences that appreciate the purest form of story-telling. After all, it was poetry that resonated with people’s minds before prose did, as the literary world evolved. The fundamentals of the concept that singing something rather than saying it gets the message across more effectively can never be undermined, irrespective of which era we live in.

There will also be a place in many people’s hearts for the grandiose West End productions and Broadway-style musicals; however, it is fantastic to see that a more edgy scene is emerging and offering a different style of musical for audiences, and that more multicultural musical theatre is finding its way onto the stage. In today’s scenario, what is required is to emphasise more on the genre or style crossovers in musical shows that will allow people from the community of self confessed sceptics, who might accept a hybrid but not a straight-up musical, to dare to take the plunge. As long as musical theatre is seen to be responding to important issues and events, as indeed in many cases it has, then there will always be a place for it in society.